May 2005

This will not come as news to seasoned
number watchers, but it is still a shock to see it revealed in a national
newspaper. Leading scientific journals 'are censoring debate on global
warming' is the headline in the Sunday
Telegraph of May 1st. The decline of that once great scientific journal Nature
has been one of the recurring themes of Number Watch since its inception,
a decline that is paralleled by that of another once great journal, Science.
The reason for the decline is that they have both been taken over by editors who
are members of the eco-theocracy.

Nothing
illustrates the nature of the beast better than this quote:

"The
idea that we would conspire to suppress science that undermines the idea of
anthropogenic climate change is both false and utterly naive about what makes
journals thrive,"

Contrast this statement with the
reality, which gave rise to the opening
diatribe of this year. This habit of saying one thing and doing another is
reminiscent of your bending author’s experience as an apprentice working in a
shop controlled by a communist shop-steward. The similarity to communism does
not end there, for one of its most powerful techniques was “entryism”.
Eco-theologians have penetrated the most powerful and influential bodies in
science at the highest level, even the Royal
Society. Needless to say, the ranks of environmental correspondents in the
media are filled by the exclusive brethren who ensure that alternative ideas are
suppressed by ruthless censorship. <material removed>.

Alas poor science!

01/05/05

In
memoriam

Sad news of the death of your bending
author’s PhD supervisor, Professor Harry House, a good man and true, brought
back memories of a fine example of one of the myths of scientific life. One of
the first authors to reference Harry’s own PhD thesis had misunderstood the
main point (a rather obscure one about the quantum mechanics of electron
emission) and had, in fact, almost reversed the meaning of the argument.
Subsequent authors virtually all propagated the same error, revealing that they
had not read the original work, though they all included it in their impressive
list of references. As it was in the beginning, is now and ever more shall be.

Amen

03/05/05

For
every action....

Election day. Two pro-science writers go
to the polls and cancel each other out Philip
Stott votes for Labour with pride and your bending author votes against
Labour with dread. It’s a funny old political world.

05/05/05

That
time of the year

Here we go gathering nuts in May
On a cold and frosty morning.
Traditional song

Every now and then some professor or
other comes up with a result so ludicrous that it makes a number watcher’s
day. It is amazing that even journalists would fall for this
example of the Birth
Month Fallacy, but even the Telegraph
did. Number watchers found it in a wide range of publications all over the
world. Just look at the range of the variable and the explanatory theories.

Gee,
thanks! We shud of known!

Mad dogs and Englishmen go out in
the midday sun
Noel Coward song

Shock horror! Sit down before
reading on.

It sometimes gets hot in the summer!

Or as the Telegraph put it Warning:
it can get hot during a heatwave.

It is so comforting to know that
thousands of highly paid civil servants are devoting their brain power to
telling us things we would never have been able to work out for ourselves. Here
are some valuable tips from the leaflet published by the aptly named DOH.

Now admit it. You would never have
thought that out for yourself.

The Times headline was Heatwave forecast spurs summer deaths warning. The paper of record
claims that the Met Office is forecasting unusually high temperatures in July
and August (which the Met Office subsequently denied). For good measure mention
was made of the previous night’s BBC “documentary drama”, oddly enough
bearing the same title as the DOH leaflet, Heatwave,
in which thousands die and the countryside catches fire.

Only a nasty old cynic would think that
it had anything to do with eco-theologists propagating the global warming myth.

That
election

Contrary to all the verbiage in the
media, the result of the UK general election in round figures was as follows.

It was a dead heat between the two major
parties. In England the Conservatives received more
votes than Labour. It was another matter in the ruling
country.

The Government was supported by one
third of the voters and a quarter of the whole electorate.

It was a good election to lose, as
Gordon Brown’s chickens are already starting to come home to roost.

Footnote:
Apologies for failing to mention that the Conservatives also had the vast
resources of the BBC and the Murdoch empire ranged against them.

12/05/05

Euromad

Madness of great ones must not unwatched go.
Hamlet

You have to admire Tim Worstall for his
moderation of language in commenting
on the latest effusions from Mad Margot. Here we have an unelected authoritarian
commissar, a one woman economic depression, pinning the label of Nazi to those who cling on to the threatened democratic traditions
that they have earned with a thousand years of struggle.

It is difficult to know which is more
striking, the chutzpah or the economic delusion.

2,600,000

If one word epitomises the corrupt,
venal and incompetent nature of the UK’s New Labour Government it is PENSIONS.

It is now
announced that the Great Leader has granted himself a pension package that
is worth a cool £2.6 million. Nothing wrong with that, if you haven’t stood
by while your Chancellor wickedly raids private pension funds to the tune of £5
billion a year, if you haven’t committed the nation to a horrendous unfunded
public sector pension bill that will shackle the economy for decades to come, if
you haven’t presided over the continual attrition of the wealth generating
sector while aggressively building up the wealth absorbing sector, if you
haven’t ignored the plight of thousands who have paid into private sector
pensions and lost the lot, if you haven’t brought back after a token absence a
minister who was forced to resign for corruption to take charge of the whole
issue. Nothing wrong at all.

What have we come to when the most
venerable scientific institution in the world writes to the media urging the
suppression of scientific debate? Such is the success of the practice of
entryism by extreme greens that they have seized control of the commanding
heights of science itself. Fortunately, there are small pockets of the
mainstream media that are still resistant to bullying and we have an article in
the Daily Telegraph by Neil
Collins headlined Global warming
generates hot air.

Just think about the implications of
this paragraph:

We are appealing to all parts of the UK media to be
vigilant against attempts to present a distorted view of the scientific evidence
about climate change and its potential effects on people and their environments
around the world. I hope that we can count on your support.

To say nothing about the crude ad
hominem attack in what followed:

There are some individuals on the fringes, sometimes
with financial support from the oil industry, who have been attempting to cast
doubt on the scientific consensus on climate change.

We have had the President writing demonstrable
and innumerate nonsense about global warming and now we have the Vice
President acting as his heavy, in an attempt to suppress any questioning of the
religious truths propounded by eco-theology.

This is also yet another attempt to
enforce the idea of the scientific consensus, even quoting a comprehensively
debunked survey of the literature that appeared (where else?) in the
neo-theological journal Nature.

The latest Swedish attempt to create a
mobile phone scare out of thin air is the usual statistical con. So, naturally,
it was swallowed whole by the media (The
Independent, the BBC,
The Mail etc.). This time it was based on statistical salami tactics. You
start with a fairly respectable Trojan Number,
then you slice it up into more and more segments (analogue/digital, urban/rural,
amount of exposure, malignancy of tumour etc) until the number in each segment
is small enough to ensure that operation of the extreme
value fallacy produces one that is superficially significant, then you think
up a physical theory to explain the result before you issue your press release,
which is seized upon by the hungry and lazy journos. There were, however, two
matters of interest in The Times
coverage. First there are further signs that Nigel (none to die) Hawkes has
either experience a Damascene conversion or he has mellowed with age. This is
his final paragraph:

Given that the earlier study found no overall
increase in risk from digital phones, the latest findings can only show an
increase in risk in rural areas by simultaneously showing a reduction of risk in
urban areas. This is inherently improbable, casting some doubt over the
reliability of the results.

Second, you won’t find that paragraph
in the version published on the The
Timesweb site.

17/05/05

Correspondence
received

Seeing as you are NOT a toxicologist, industrial hygeinist,
epidemiologist, or statistician by training, I don't see where you get
off critiquing studies related to environmental contaminants and
health outcomes.

One of the most striking things about your page, is that you criticize
anything that does not support the various industries that produce
toxins. You hand pick the studies to criticize; I would call that
junk-critiquing. It seems that your hypothesis that environmental
contaminants have no adverse health effects is flawed since you are
not willing to update it in the face of any new evidence. You
critique each study with this dogmatic approach.

In fact, most of your material on p-values and odds ratio seems to be
the run-of-the-mill stuff that is on all "junk science" type pages.
In fact, I would be surprised if you hadn't just cut and pasted it
from another page.

Most of the people you cite as pseudo-scientists are dedicated to the
scientific principle and take a very close and hard look at their
data. They do not produce their work with the intent to confuse or
scare the public. The vast majority are truly concerned for the
safety and well-being of all human beings. This is what drives their
work. You should consider this before you label your next study as
junk.

Sincerely,

Joe Braun

04/06/07

Another
Family feud

In the bleak landscape afforded by the
new establishment that rules our lives, among the rare shafts of illumination is
the pleasure that we can take in the disputes that arise among our
self-appointed masters. One to relish was the
spat between the New Labour Government and New Labour BBC over the slight
embellishment of the “intelligence” on WMD, which ended with blood on the
floor, mostly of BBC sputniks.

The latest family squabble is between
two pillars of that establishment, Lancet and the Royal Society. Both have been
penetrated and colonised by the eco-theologians who have stood science and its
method on its head. Search Number Watch
for Lancet and you will find a nice selection of politically correct inventions,
even down to an attempt to influence the US election with a particularly
outrageous example of epidemiological extrapolation. For the Royal Society you
only have to look at the example of the secret Vice Presidential
Letter, one of the most egregious examples of the modern inversion of the
scientific method ever, the leaking of which (desperately sadly) caused barely a
ripple.

Thus it is particularly exquisite to
read the Daily Telegraphpiece
headlined The Lancet takes a scalpel to
the ‘lazy shrill’ Royal Society. Each side in the argument cites
examples of disgraceful behaviour by the other, each is correct, even
understated.

Of course, history tells us that all was
not sweetness and light in the Royal Society. Its most famous President, one of
the greatest geniuses ever, Sir Isaac Newton, spitefully expunged all records of
the remarkable work of his predecessor and rival, Robert Hooke, one of the
giants on whose shoulders he stood. He devoted much of his later life to alchemy
and the Old Testament prophets and, like Albert Einstein, wasted his genius
because of his beliefs.

The difference now is that they are just
as nasty, but they are no longer geniuses. They are just ordinary chancers,
proselytes to the religion of eco-theology, members of a self perpetuating
elite, who are willing to sacrifice the hard won methodology of science for
their beliefs and, if necessary, resort to any subterfuge to promote them.

20/05/05

Grounded

Every now and then there is a newspaper
story that tells you everything you need to know about some aspect of life. This
story does so for the relationship between The EU and the UK. Just consider
these two paragraphs (emphasis added).

The last Flying Fortress in Britain will not be
making a tribute flypast because it has been grounded by a new European
regulation that puts the B17 into the weight category of an airliner, boosting
its insurance premium by an unaffordable 500 per cent.

… … …

It is also supposed to affect the only other B17
flying in Europe - Pink Lady, operating in France - although a spokesman for the
company said the French government had
not enforced the rule and Pink Lady was flying as normal.

Which brings us to the little known rule
zero of the EU:

Rule Zero:
All rules apply equally to all members of the union, except France and Germany.

21/05/05

The
greatest conspiracy in human history

If anything is more shocking than that
secret letter from the Royal Society to the media it is the lack of reaction
to it. If the equivalent had happened in any other field of human activity, such
as the Chief Rabbi advocating anti-Semitism, there would have been uproar.

There are by tradition two theories of
history, the conspiracy and the cock-up. Conspiracy theories are a dime a dozen.
Any notable statesman or film star meeting an untimely death will spawn dozens
of books, all with different but incompatible conspiracy theories. We all, when
visiting Dallas, for example, peer through the Depository window, stand on the
grassy knoll and conjecture on the myriad explanations of what actually
happened, but the truth is lost in the cloud of unknowing and invention. Battles
from Bosworth to Arnhem were decided by cock-ups rather than any human planning,
which goes for most of the events that caused a fork in human history. Of
course, there have always been the likes of the lean and hungry, daggers drawn,
senators, but the great majority of significant events were the product of
randomness or negligence. For want of a nail the battle was lost.

It is therefore not only a dangerous
step to nominate something as the greatest conspiracy ever, but it invites
accusations of pretentiousness or worse. Just look, however, at the ingredients.

Some of those involved are organisations
of size and power never before seen in human affairs – The Murdoch Empire, the
BBC, political parties (particularly the Greens, but also those overtly or
covertly affiliated to them), demonstrably corrupt international bodies, such as
the United Nations and the EU etc. In addition there are huge industries raking
off obscene profits, such as the wind turbine manufacturer who is a major
donor to the party of Government that diverted substantial tax revenues into
his pocket (not unique, as a minister for the other lot , Gummer,
launched the whole thing and then set up a couple of companies to exploit it).
Above all there is that large proportion of the populace that is seduced by the
idealistic preachments of the eco-theologues. They acquiesce to the destruction
of the environment (and people) in the name of the environment, simply because
they never hear the alternative argument. They are cold-bloodedly manipulated by
a new priesthood, to whom science and its methods are at best an irrelevance.

Any doubt that it is a conspiracy if
finally removed by the fact that we were not supposed to know about that letter.
It was issued just to the media. But for the accident that one member was not so
pliable, we would still not know.

It is not that the proponents are simply
mistaken – that would be forgivable. They know that they are lying: otherwise
there would be no need for all the manufactured and selective evidence, the
appeal to a claimed consensus (the like of which has never had a place within
the scientific method), the gross attempts to censor any contrary argument, the
abandonment of the essential scepticism of science, the vilification of
doubters, the direction of huge quantities of taxpayers money into acquiescent
“research” groups, the barrage of angled news-stories, the drama
documentaries, irrelevant interpolations into editorial commentaries and on and
on.

The evidence for the global warming
disaster theory does not stand up to the most cursory examination, like the global
cooling disaster theory that preceded it. Yet, a majority of simple souls
accept that it is true, because it has been drummed into their brains by
incessant repetition.

Now the appeal is based on the
“scientific consensus”. From Galileo, through Darwin to Einstein, there is a
clear law of scientific consensus;

The law of scientific consensus:

At times of scientific contention
the consensus is always wrong.

Alas, poor science.

25/05/05

"Consensus!"
they cry

No sooner have we stated the law of
scientific consensus then an illustration involving one of the most prominent
myths of our time arises in the media. Readers of these pages or the associated
books will have been aware that the salt
scare is a house built on sand. Now, yet another study has poured cold water
on it, but without achieving a solution.

There is no need to cut your salt
intake, say scientists is the Sunday
Telegraph headline. The fun is in the coda. First there is the
inevitable professor:

Prof Graham MacGregor, a cardiovascular specialist at
St George's Hospital, London, and the chairman of Consensus
Action on Salt and Health, said: "You will always find scientists that will
go against the main body of research.

''Chronic ingestion of the amount of salt that we eat
slowly puts up our blood pressure and is largely responsible for many strokes
and heart attacks and that's why the five to six grams a day target was
set."

Then there is the inevitable quango:

A spokesman for the Food Standards Agency added:
"It's misleading and irresponsible to challenge the Government's
recommendation using a very selective view of science, and will not help people
make healthier choices about what they eat.

"Over one third of British adults have high
blood pressure and two thirds of them are not receiving any treatment.

"There is scientific consensus that there are real benefits to be achieved by reducing
salt intake, such as reducing the risk of heart disease and stroke."

The
perfect scare

<material removed>. ‘Safe’
painkiller may carry raised breast cancer riskyells
The Sunday Times headline (subtly
different in the web
version). Spot the missing numbers in these paragraphs:

The research followed more than 114,000
Californian women aged 22-85, all of them free from breast cancer at the start
of the trials. All were asked to give details of the pills and medicines they
consumed.

During the six-year study period 2,391 of the
women contracted breast cancer. The researchers then examined what drugs they
had taken prior to becoming ill. They estimate that in perhaps a few dozen of
the cancer cases ibuprofen use may have played a part.

More than 23,000 of the women in the study used
ibuprofen regularly and 8,000 were using it daily, most of them for more than
five years. There are no figures for British use of the drug.

Yes,
there are four Trojan numbers, but no results.
Nothing you can criticise, just the old catch phrase statistically
significant. What a brilliant coup! That’s one in the eye for all those
carping sceptics.

Under
the Law of Beneficial Developments,
Ibuprofen was bound to be targeted, but what a masterstroke to leave out the
numbers on which the claim is based! The ordinary punters see a bunch of big
numbers and are impressed, without realising that they have been conned, while
the nasty old cynics have nothing to get their grubby hands on.

Quotation
of the month

In this month of the descent into
religiosity of the Royal Society, number watcher Alwyn Davis came across an apt
quotation. He writes:

Referring to
Aristotelian experiments, intended to illustrate a preconceived
"truth" and convince people of its validity, Thomas Sprat, an English
clergyman and writer, said:

"A
most venomous thing in the making of sciences; for whoever has fixed on
his cause before he has experimented can hardly avoid fitting his experiment to
his own cause........rather than the cause to the truth of the experiment
itself"

The above is
from, "The History of The Royal Society", written
in..................wait for it..............................1667.

Number
of the month – 200

Let it be clear. We at Numeric Towers
have nothing against the number 200. It is a nice number. It has an attractive
roundness that contrasts with the angular aggression of 201, yet none of the
arbitrary insouciance of 199. All that being said, it is only in the Dark State
of Insanity that such an innocent number could be invested with a significance
that it was not designed to bear. Number watcher Frank Borger draws attention to
the fact that, believe it or not, the earnest legislators of California have decreed
that school text books may no longer be more than 200 pages in length.

Talk about fiddling while Rome burns!
There they sit, in the midst of the ruins of a once fine education system,
thinking up daft new ways of micromanaging its final descent into a total
shambles. At least their pupils will learn to read the small print, a necessity
in that haunt of predatory lawyers.

It is hard to say which is the more
astonishing and depressing, the Procrustean policy itself or the fact that the
legislators think that it is their job to interfere in every detail of the lives
of their victims. The disastrous outcome of decades of such activity is only too
self evident.

Where the Dark State leads others
follow. Only this month in the UK, The Great Leader, fresh from his electoral
triumph, has been wittering on about “respect”.
This is his solution to the educational disaster in his own benighted country.
He and his ilk have been nibbling away at school discipline until there is
nothing left. Many schools are now under the control of young thugs, who hold
their teachers and fellow pupils in the grip of terror. When they leave school
they terrorise neighbourhoods. The do-gooders responsible for this situation
blame everyone but themselves – parents, pubs, police etc. The Labour Minister
for education in the 1960s, Anthony Crossland, boasted
that he was going to “close down every fucking grammar school”. The policy
was designed to cut off the escape route of intelligent working class children
– the Public (i.e. private) Schools of the toffs were left untouched – and
the foul language typifies the inherent mire of his party’s social attitude.
Incidentally, the state of the present regime is magnificently parodied in a programme
on an obscure BBC digital channel. The cost to the economy alone of this act of
destruction is incalculable, but the cost to the culture is in evidence all
about you. Not to be beaten, the Conservatives later wrecked the best university
system in the world.

These professional political dabblers
ought to read (fat chance) The Doctrines
of the Great Educators by Robert R Rusk, first published in 1918 and
reissued a dozen times since. From Plato onwards, these great men really thought
about education. A millennium ago, Quintilian described the sort of education
that was developed in the Anglo Saxon world up until the communal insanity that
enveloped it in the latter half or the twentieth century.